Doctor Who - The Adventure Games [episodes one and two] : Mac
This year, the BBC decided that alongside the usual series of Doctor Who, they’d have four episodes not as normal TV, but as adventure games. There’s some official word about the stories in the games being canon and treated as real episodes, so playing these games (if you are a Doctor Who fanboy, like me) becomes something of a ‘must’ rather than an option. Still, I’m a good audience - I’m a real Doctor Who head, and a games enthusiast. Can’t go wrong!
It took me an age to get down to playing them though. In the end it was because Alicia (my nearly-three-year-old daughter for those who don’t know) wanted to play them one afternoon that we actually sat down to do it; me controlling everything and her shouting out comments and advice.
At the time of writing this, only two episodes have been released, with the third coming out next Friday. I decided to review the first two as one object, and then the second two later. The first, then, is City of the Daleks. If you are going to launch something new with Doctor Who, pop Daleks in it to be assured an audience.
City of the Daleks starts off with the Doctor and Amy (this is Doctor eleven, for those counting) visiting Earth in 1963. It’s all scripted by the real Doctor Who boys and voiced by the real cast, so there are absolutely no complaints there. It also starts (after the initial cut-scene) with a real Doctor Who introduction sequence, which (and I admit I’m sad) is quite thrilling and adds a sense of official-tie-in-ness to the whole thing. You jump out of the Tardis into an alternate time-line 1963 where the Daleks have taken over the Earth and Trafalgar Square is a big mess.
First things first; these are kid’s games. The target audience seems to be someone in the 10-12ish age bracket in terms of game difficulty. That’s no bad thing, but it means immediately that I am not stretched in terms of working out what to do or achieving it. Being Doctor Who though, and being done properly, the atmosphere is very good indeed. The first section sees you hiding from some Daleks as you try to get underground, and though the game is over-helpful in telling you exactly where the Daleks are looking and holding your hand through the section (and indeed, every other subsequent section) you still jump a foot out of your chair when you make a mistake and the Dalek sees you and screams out its intention to exterminate! I played through the entire thing with Alicia sat on my knee and every time we drew attention to ourselves, we were both cowering in fear and jumping out of our skin in appropriate places.
The adventuring sections are peppered with odd little minigames which could cause you to think a bit if you were ten years old, but I simply passed through them without effort. They are a nice break-up to the main game though, and I can see them being perfectly placed for the target market.
It took somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour to complete the first episode. To say I was impressed by the timing is a little understating it; this feels like you are playing through a real episode of Doctor Who. There’s enough here to give the game a story, and yet it is short enough that it doesn’t cut swathes out of your life. The episodes are actually a perfect length and credit has to be given for the design team managing to do that.
City of the Daleks then ends up being a lot of fun, with real frightening atmosphere, an interesting storyline (with some great tie-in mentions for the series as a whole) and some great atmospheric moments. There’s nothing quite as exciting as running past a load of Daleks shouting ‘Exterminate!’ or ‘I cannot see! My vision is impaired!’. Top stuff!
Moving on then, the second episode is Blood of the Cybermen. This immediately has a more thoughtful feel to it, opening as it does (after an equally cool cut-scene to title-sequence intro) with some little puzzles to solve rather than an action sequence. This feel continues on throughout the episode, as you tend to solve issues by utilising tools around you rather than running past them. It’s a nice counterpoint to the first game but does mean, at least as far as Alicia was concerned, that it wasn’t as exciting.
Recent Doctor Who has had a real problem with Cybermen stories, in that in order to make them different, they keep coming up with stupid Cyber-varients. This game is no exception and we see Cyber-slugs for the first time (a definite theft of face-huggers from Alien) and a ridiculous plot based around the idea of flesh-to-metal conversion via a virus. Yup, no joke. This is a shame because the actual game is great, with some tense moments as you sneak around, and some genuinely well worked out puzzles.
The mini-games are cleverer this time, and the latter ones actually make you think which is great. Again, the episode runs to 45 minutes or so and you come out feeling like you just watched (and participated in) a Doctor Who episode, helped greatly by the judicious use of cut-scenes and voice acting. Both the Doctor and Amy feel just right, and make you smile in all the right places.
All in all, I’m looking forward to Episode Three: ‘Tardis’, and whatever the fourth one will be. For gaming heads, these are a bit too simple and aimed at a very specific audience and if you’ve never come across Doctor Who they are probably a bit crap, but for Doctor Who fans who have spent the last thirty-something years hoping a game would come along where they get to be the Doctor, these are pretty great indeed. I happen to be in the latter camp.
